As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company's social media strategies for Billian's HealthDATA and Porter Research. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs and currently manages social marketing channels for the Health IT Leadership Summit and Technology Association of Georgia’s Health Society. You can find her on Twitter @JennDennard.

In my conversations at HIMSS a few weeks ago with providers and vendors, I heard more than a few references to user-friendly EMR design, easy-to-use dashboards and the bar that has been set so high by Apple and the iPad. I had a chance to chat with David Carleton, VP and CIO at Heritage Valley Health System in Pennsylvania, about the adoption of the iPad in the clinical setting, particularly with regard to EMRs. Carleton, with the assistance of dbMotion, helped a team of docs and IT staff at HVHS in Pennsylvania develop their own EMR iPad app.

In a nutshell, the internet Clinical Access Portal (iCAP) app organizes and harmonizes data captured and stored in various systems – including its Allscripts Enterprise ambulatory solution and its soon-to-be-completed Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager, as well as the ClinicalConnect HIE in western Pennsylvania – and delivers Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) to HVHS providers via the tablet. Named to the 2012 Top 100 Integrated Healthcare Networks, HVHS seems to be placing a high priority on enabling its facilities to be truly interoperable with one another. It made sense to me that the hospital would want to better enable its physicians with a handy iPad app, but I wondered why they took the in-house development route.

Carleton explained to me that one of the reasons was physician buy-in. (You can view more of our chat in the video below.) Apparently, the key to getting physicians to adopt and consistently use the tablet and app was to have them on board from the very beginning. Involvement in the design process let them have a say as to what would best fit their workflows.

With the release of the iPad 3, the details of which were announced yesterday, I’m willing to bet we’ll see an up tick in clinical interest in the iPad and a corresponding surge in app development – in-house or otherwise.

Are you aware of other facilities getting into the EMR app game? Please share the details in the comments below.